It’s Beginning to Look A Lot Like… A Crappy 2009…

… everywhere you go. If you put your money in those “Going Out of Business” signs, you may be in for a record year in 2009. And you’re probably having a pretty good 2008.

My wife and I were hoping our local National Wholesale Liquidators would stay open despite its recent Chapter 11 filing (and the fact we hadn’t shopped there for quite some time). But… we saw the signs going up Wednesday night.

And of course there’s K.B. Toy’s, right up the road at Westfield Shoppingtown. They couldn’t dodge the bullet like it had for several years. Steve & Barry’s, Linens N Things, a chunk of Circuit City’s locations… the sight of retailers dying during the holiday season just shows how vulnerable the marketplace is.

My Multichannel Merchant co-workers and I are going to have a busy January reporting about other merchants filing for Chapter 11 or Chapter 7. Depending on which analysts you talk with, there’s going to be a few on the horizon. Others see a bankruptcy epidemic.

This could be a dream come true for the mergers and acquisitions people, who like to buy vulnerable merchants, scale them back, and hope to sell at a profit. But do they even have the money? Not like there’s a lot of credit to go around.

And will these investment firms take a chance on some of these retailers? They’re going to have to be a little more choosier before they decide on who to buy. It’s no longer a case of where they can trim home office sizes, but what kind of inventory and real estate issues there are.

Look at what happened when Bay Harbour Management looked to rescue Steve & Barry’s – it was proof that there’s a sucker born every minute.